We want to explore having a touch screen info kiosk where members/visitors could find out more about the church, see who staff and directors are, etc. I’m looking into a simple touch screen computer and using a basic website for content, but I’m wondering if anyone here has done a DIY kiosk.

We did exactly what Jared recommends. We have three RasPi’s that boot into Chromium directly in kiosk mode. Two go straight to our DVR’s internal web link and have credentials saved so they auto sign-in. The third goes straight to our website, and has a touch screen that can be used to navigate the page. The two that go to our DVR are at our security desk and the church office entry room, which both have door buzzers to let people in off hours.

I tried to also generalize it a bit, but there may be some weird stuff that just wouldn’t apply to your use case. You can safely ignore it, or ask, and I’ll edit the master doc to reflect a more general model.

Thanks! Ultimately, it’s a super cheap and flexible option that’s generally easy to maintain. We use a lot of Raspberry Pi’s for various tasks around our building. Documenting is my fall-back, because I’m the only one at my church that knows how these are configured, or how to do it again if I ever die randomly. I try hard not to leave my fellow trustees up a creek, so to speak.

And we use RiseVision for software, so we can configure the webpage from the cloud.

The only complaint I have so far is that the Planar touchscreens are a little dim in natural light. I wish they were 350-400 nits. We also built one without the stand or label printer and using the Planar 24-inch variant, which was significantly cheaper.

We use Porteus Kiosk for our timeclock system, which is a lightweight linux based software that is super easy to setup. You can load it free using either Chrome or Firefox and even lock it down to only access specific sites. You can pay the added cost to keep it updated, but really it only takes a few minutes to run a reload with a config file if needed.

We just recently put in a set of 4 iPads in Bouncepad kiosk stands into our lobby. All are charging and are networked over Cat6. They look really good and get used for many different purposes. They replaced 2 large Windows touchscreen computers that were bought for the same purpose, but never fulfilled it. The iPad screens feel very nice and have taken the high traffic well.